Derry T-shirts taking the Internet by storm!

Andrew Quinn

When Derry man Ray Reynolds shared a few photos of T-shirts emblazoned with well known Derry sayings on social media he never could have predicted what would happen next.

Ray used computer software to create images of T-shirts with well know Derry sayings such as ‘Who’s your bars?’, ‘Pat Ramsey found my phone but stole my heart’ and ‘Aye naw, sure anno’.

After he’d completed several different images, Ray decided to share them on Facebook and the rest, as they say, is history.

“It started out as a joke,” Ray told the ‘Journal’. “I was editing some photos and thinking of Derry catchphrases to go with them. I’m a photographer for R.R Media Derry. I got the idea for a T-shirt saying ‘Pat Ramsey found my phone but stole my heart’ and it just made me laugh.”

Ray added: “An hour later and I had 50 T-shirt designs and tears in my eyes from laughing.

“Luckily, Derry is a proverbial gold mine when it comes catchphrases so I had lots of material.

“I shared the images on my own Facebook page and it just took off over night.

“In the first few hours I realised I was on to something and had messages from about 30 strangers looking for shirts so I thought why not?

“I checked stockers and local printers and before I knew it I had a new business and over 100 orders in 24 hours.”

Ray’s T-shirt designs have been shared and liked my thousands of people on Facebook living in different parts of the world and he called his new business ‘Derry Wear’.

“After hundreds of messages and over 500 shares on the album alone I set up a business page and started taking orders on there. We have people in New York and Canada wanting us to ship them internationally.

“Everyone and their granny has these wee sayings unique to our corner of the world. Plus they all make me chuckle and as they say in the Creggan, sure that’s the main thing.”